Mama Nneka walked into University of Ibadan’s
lecture hall at six a.m. every day, her bata
tied tight, her school fees paid with fried
plantain sales outside the gate. She taught
History to thirdyears, her voice calm as the
Niger in dry season, her notes written in ink
that never smudged — because she wiped every
page with a cloth dipped in bitter leaf water,
her mother’s way to keep lies from sticking.
The curse began when her mother, Aunty Eze,
vanished after the ’66 riots. No body. No grave.
Just a red wrapper left on the family shrine,
tied with three black threads. The village
elders said she traded her voice for peace — but
the land remembered.
Three weeks after Nneka’s student, Chukwuma,
accused her of stealing his thesis, the earth
cracked open behind the History Department. Not
an earthquake. Not sinkhole. The soil split like
a wound, and from it rose the scent of smoked
yam and burnt kola — the smell of her mother’s
last meal before she disappeared.
The university expelled her for “unprofessional
conduct.” No hearing. No appeal. The
vicechancellor’s memo said she’d “corrupted
academic integrity.” But the real rule that bit?
No woman who speaks to ancestral spirits may
teach the young. Not since ’67. The law was
never written — it lived in the way the campus
generator sputtered every time a pastor’s
daughter passed the old library.
That night, Nneka walked to the shrine behind
the old market. She knelt. She didn’t pray. She
placed her lecturing badge on the cracked earth.
At dawn, the entire faculty woke to find every
textbook on Nigerian history rewritten in
charcoal on the walls — not by hand, but by
roots that had grown through floorboards. Pages
turned themselves. Names of missing women from
the postindependence purges appeared, one after
another, until the last line: Aunty Eze, who
spoke when silence was the only weapon left.
The university sealed the building. The press
called it a prank. But in Surulere, mothers
stopped sending daughters to university. In
Enugu, students whispered that the land
remembers what men erase.
Mama Nneka never returned to Lagos. She now
walks the roads between Ibadan and Oyo, carrying
a basket of chalk. She writes names on walls.
Not for students. For the dead.
The curse didn’t end. It just changed shape.
And the soil? It still smells like yam after
rain.
